There’s now a booming outlet for fanfic, including stories “portraying a near future where the Trump administration has criminalized selfies, radicalizing Kim Kardashian as a freedom fighter for women’s rights.” The Toronto startup Wattpad has moved the online subculture closer to the mainstream publishing world, and former AFC editor Rea McNamara has written a fascinating profile on the subculture and its transition. [NOW]

The Broad’s upcoming exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is expected to be a huge blockbuster when it opens on October 21. The museum announced yesterday that they’ll be pre-selling all 50,000 tickets for the show online on September 1st at noon. I’d be worried about servers crashing from that volume of traffic. [Los Angeles Times]

In other L.A. news, Art Battle just took place in the Arts District and it sounds like it was terrible. It’s a live painting competition, which involved lots of paintings of pop culture things, dollar signs, hearts, and someone named “Art Barbie”. [artnet News]

Wow. Add this to the bucket list: the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle left behind a 14 acre sculpture park in Tuscany inspired by Gaudi’s Park Güell. Her “Tarot Garden” is populated by giant goddess figures and a feminist takes on the tarot deck. This looks really cool. [Artsy]

Hong Kong high school students just set a world record for a display of 1,214 3D-printed sculptures of buildings from the city’s skyline. It kinda looks like a Won Ju Lim installation! (The 3D printing marathon was organized to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to mainland Chinese rule… which has been a less than great thing so far for the city’s pro-democracy activists, but that’s another story). [South China Morning Post]

Congrats to Cindy Cheng, winner of the 2017 Sondheim Prize of $25,000. (As a curator, I’ve worked with Cheng before and can vouch that she totally deserves it!) Here, Angela N. Carroll, Bret McCabe, and Cara Ober discuss all the finalists. [BmoreArt]

This Summer, we checked out Wickerham & Lomax’s winning Sondheim Prize installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art. That exhibition offered dark humor informed by a queer perspective on various subcultures—dominated by larger-than-life hazing paddles emblazoned with Greek letters. Here, they’ve sent us a GIF vision of frat-boy hell.

MICA
1300 W. Mount Royal Ave.
Baltimore, MD
Sondheim Semi-Finalist ExhibitionWhat’s on view: 54 Semi-finalists for the Sondheim Prize held inside several MICA Galleries. Lots of sculpture, lots of photographs, and a few paintings that made the short list for the Sondheim Prize, an annual open call juried exhibition for baltimore-area artists. (This includes artists living in cities like Washington.) There’s no theme, and no attempt to forge one. All the galleries were crammed with work.

Michael Anthony Farley: Really, I think everyone has the same complaint every year: there is just too much stuff! No matter what strategies are employed, the show just always feels overhung and uneven.

Paddy Johnson: Honestly, I think you’re being overly-generous to this show. It was terrible.